Children's Book Review: Tales from Outer Suburbia

Tales from Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan (Levine/Scholastic, $19.99, 9780545055888/0545055881, 96 pp., ages 12-up, February 2009)

Tan, who brilliantly and wordlessly illuminated the immigrant experience in The Arrival, invites readers to consider the perils of suburban life and its numbing of the senses in these 15 stories and strips. A water buffalo stands like a wise totem in a vacant lot, wordlessly and "literally point[ing] us in the right direction"--until the neighbors' problems become "urgent," they stop visiting, and he goes away. A foreign exchange student who resembles a walking leaf (and whose name is difficult to pronounce, so the narrator calls him "Eric") silently poses questions to his hosts about what makes a stamp adhere to a letter or why a drain is shaped like a flower; then Eric leaves suddenly but with a parting gift of tiny plants that grow in the dark cupboard where he had stayed. The related images of Eric all appear in black-and-white except for these brightly colored tendrils and petals that spring from castoff caps, peanut shells and pencil sharpeners. The tale "Broken Toys" reveals deep emotion and kindness behind a seemingly cruel neighbor the narrator nicknames "Mrs. Bad News." In each tale, Tan seems to suggest that the children remain open to the small gifts life brings, while the adults grow immune to them. In "Undertow," a "mysterious, gently breathing creature" suddenly appears on the lawn of a home where the sounds of slamming doors and crashing objects are the norm; a neighbor boy identifies the creature as a dugong, a mammal that lives in the Indian Ocean. After a rescue truck takes the dugong away, the homeowners go back to screaming and slamming doors. Only the boy steals back in the night to lie on the grass matted down by the miraculous visitor, soaking up the magic of the event.

Tan smoothly varies the pacing, alternating shorter pieces with longer ones, more narrative pieces with more visual ones, the loose pen-and-inks of "Grandpa's Story" with the highly stylized Edward Hopper-esque backdrops of "Stick Figures." One of the loveliest selections, "Distant Rain," is tucked into the middle of the book: "Have you ever wondered what happens to all the poems people write?" the piece begins. Tan fits together into a collage images of the different ways that he imagines people flush away their creative work for fear of others' response, "doomed to join a vast, invisible river of waste that flows out of suburbia." But he also pictures "some especially insistent pieces of writing" escaping, gathering force into a kind of snowball until it hovers like a moon, "float[ing] gently above suburban rooftops when everybody is asleep," then bursts, "faded words pressed into accidental verse." This provocative collection, with its recurring images of empty blocks and lonely dogs, suggests that the danger begins when we stop seeing the details and perceive only the sameness. As the narrator and his brother note when they set out to settle a bet on whether a map is accurate or not and wind up at the precipice of a waste dump: "The farther we ventured, the more everything looked the same. . . . Only the names were different." What a powerful message for citizens of all ages, especially teens who are hardwired to question everything around them. Tan suggests that human beings are not meant to accept the status quo; we merely get lulled into it if we do not remain awake and alert.--Jennifer M. Brown